ABSTRACT
The Iron Age may appeal to researchers and the public as a result of the broad spiritual message of a relatively egalitarian and environmental decentralised past. By contrast, across Europe, the Roman period tends to be defined as more structured and hierarchical, more urban and industrial (Hingley, Bonacchi and Sharpe 2018; González Álvarez and Alonso González 2013). The idea of the egalitarian Iron Age is perhaps primarily intended to create the British pre-Roman past as an effective opposition to what is supposed to have happened during the period of Roman domination, creating a more effective image of opposition in the modern world than the idea of the ultimately ineffectual resistance of Iron Age populations to the military campaigns of a dominant Roman military.
Subversive accounts draw deeply on ideas that stem from anthropological research to reconceptualise the materials that derive from the writings of classical authors and from archaeological research. It is the developing relationship of anthropological research to archaeology that helped to create the idea of non-hierarchical societies. Sillitoe (2013) makes a relevant point when he addresses the power of ideas of the egalitarian Iron Age, although he entirely sidelines the complex ways that ideas of egalitarianism and freedom have been transformed, lost and rediscovered—from the writings of Caesar to the present day. We reinvent the past for the present that we perceive. Whether we really believe that the Iron Age was in any way meaningfully egalitarian presumably relates to our beliefs, aspirations and concerns about the present. This idea of egalitarian living has been partly defined against the opposing duality of Roman inequality and violently imposed order, but all aspects of Iron Age and Roman heritage are concepts that we draw upon as part of a challenge to the present. The idea that the ancient past could have been egalitarian continues to seem deeply relevant in our increasingly unequal society, and this chapter has aimed to challenge the heterogeneity of what has come to be considered as constituent of the Iron Age across Britain. We also need to reflect on comparable subversive and dominant accounts in other parts of Europe.
